Monday, April 12, 2010

Health Eating Tip #2-Eat your Veggies.


Vegetables are an important nutrient and vitamin packed food that all of us need to eat regularly everyday. Most children and teens don't want to eat the green stuff, but there are clever ways to add vegetables to your diet. The best way though is just try them you never know if you like something unless you try it, and French fries don't count as a vegetable!





Sunday, April 4, 2010

Healthy Eating Tip #1-Watch what you Drink.

I know you really can't eat liquids, but we often don't realize how much sugar and calories we consume from all the soft drinks, chocolate/strawberry milk, and artificially flavored fruit juices we drink. Drink more water, and avoid these sugary drinks. Always drink your favorite drinks in moderation, not all the time with every meal. 

Friday, April 2, 2010

Experimentations

I have a lot of cousins that are currently in elementary school, and it was suggested that I use them as my guinea pigs. I will be running a simple experiment with them asking them which choice of food they would choose for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and why. I would also like to run other little experiments throughout this process and post my results up. So look out for those as well as healthy eating tips coming very soon! Check out this chart from HowStuffWorks, scary huh!


Sunday, March 28, 2010

Tacos!

Last week I found out tacos can be healthy for you and still taste amazingly good! By my work there is this Taqueria (Spanish for taco shop) where we had lunch, and the tacos were really good! The best part of the experience is what was in the tacos, only grilled marinated chicken,cilantro, and fresh salsa on a very small corn tortilla. I realized I did not need any cheese or sour cream on my taco, and nor did I need a big portion to feel satisfied. I also skipped out choosing the burrito, which was probably the best decision I made that day. Finding out this is actually the authentic way tacos are made kind of makes me wonder why we need to have cheese or sour cream on our tacos at fast food places like Taco Bell, or school lunches? Another shocking thing I learned from Jamie Olivers Food Revolution we are the first generation expected to die earlier then our parents all because of our terrible diet. That statistic should really make all of us stop and think for a second. We need to start eating healthier, and it starts at home parents! More on my thoughts on this later.

The Fat Kid Project

I will be starting a project about making choices. I hope to create a book for teens, about making the right food choices as a kid. Having good illustrations, and being funny will be important so the book can be appealing to children in that age range. I think it is really important to educate young children on the importance of eating right, especially since childhood obesity is becoming a real problem in this country. I would know I struggle with my own weight, and making good food choices even at my age of 24.

 I was watching Jamie Olivers Food Revolution on the ABC, and was really shocked at what kids these days are eating! There were kids that did not even know what some of the most basic vegetables were! Also this past Friday I was volunteering at a Multicultural night at my cousin's elementary school, and dinner was provided for that night. I was keenly observing what the kids where eating the most of, and drinking. I was in charges of handing out the drinks to the kids. The two choices of beverage were lemonade, and water. I would say 90% of the kids went for the sugary lemonade repeatedly. Hardly any kids where interested in drinking water! I also noticed that most kids where piling on the pizza, and the sugary stuff like brownie bites. None of them interesting in the vegetable plate of any of the homemade stuff that was brought. Why is that? I know pizza and sugary stuff is good, but always in moderation. Many of these kids just kept coming back for more of this food like 2-3 times. I assume they kept eating because there was a lot of pizza and sweets and it was readily available. The scary part is some of the adults were doing the same thing! Those kind of eating habits at an early age can lead to being overweight or obese.

I hope this book can do a good job of educating kids to eat right, and eating all the stuff we like in moderation.  For now I think I need to focus on weaving a good story! :)